<html><head></head><body style="word-wrap: break-word; -webkit-nbsp-mode: space; -webkit-line-break: after-white-space; "><div><div>On Dec 29, 2010, at 1:03 PM, Keith Henson wrote:</div><br class="Apple-interchange-newline"><blockquote type="cite"><span class="Apple-style-span" style="border-collapse: separate; font-family: Verdana; font-style: normal; font-variant: normal; font-weight: normal; letter-spacing: normal; line-height: normal; orphans: 2; text-indent: 0px; text-transform: none; white-space: normal; widows: 2; word-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-horizontal-spacing: 0px; -webkit-border-vertical-spacing: 0px; -webkit-text-decorations-in-effect: none; -webkit-text-size-adjust: auto; -webkit-text-stroke-width: 0px; font-size: medium; ">You can't avoid the physics. For example, the pumps take around 1<br>kW/100 feet, or 53 kW/mile, ~1 MW for the whole string.<br>If the power went up at 1000 volts, it would take 1000 amps.</span></blockquote><br></div><div>I'm sure you can do better than 1000 volts before downconversion becomes a serious issue; and if the wire conductor is so thin and the electrical resistance so high that it causes you to waste energy and the wire gets a little hot, so be it. You're only making one of these things so you can afford the electric bill. And you'd have 18 miles of open air to radiate that waste heat away, so the wire shouldn't get so hot as to cause problems; radiant energy is proportional to the FOURTH power of the temperature , double the temperature of the wire and you radiate away 16 times as much waste heat energy, so it's not going to get so hot as to be unmanageable. </div><div><br></div><div><blockquote type="cite">The wire near the base is going to mass more than the pumps</blockquote><br></div><div>Even if true so what? If it saves the world then hang the cost and just build the damn thing, you only need to make one.</div><div><br></div><div> John K Clark</div></body></html>